About the performer

Anthony Marwood

ANTHONY MARWOOD was named Instrumentalist of the Year by the Royal Philharmonic Society in 2006. He is a frequent soloist with orchestras around the world, and in the 2009/10 and 2010/11 seasons he will make his debuts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony, the New Zealand Symphony, the Melbourne Symphony, and the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra, and has re-invitations to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Bournemouth Symphony, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra at the Maribor Festival. He has worked with conductors such as Valery Gergiev, Thomas Adès, Yan Pascal Tortelier, and Douglas Boyd.

Marwood also enjoys a flourishing career as a director, and since January 2006 he has been Artistic Director of the Irish Chamber Orchestra. Last autumn he completed a second 12-concert tour as soloist/director with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and in the future will direct Les Violons du Roy in Canada, the Scottish Ensemble, and the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne. He is a regular collaborator with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (their first CD together won high praise). His passion for theater resulted in two U.K. tours with the Academy of a fully-staged production of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale, in which he acted the role of the Soldier as well as playing the violin part – his performance, directed by Lawrence Evans, was picked as one of the cultural highlights of the year by the Daily Telegraph.

He has had many works written for him, including Sally Beamish’s 1995 concerto, subsequently televised for BBC4 and recorded on the BIS label. In the 2009/10 season Marwood premieres two new concertos written for him, one by American composer Steven Mackey (a concerto for violin and electric guitar, commissioned jointly by the ASMF and the ICO) and one from New Zealander Ross Harris, with the NZSO. Thomas Adès’ concerto, “Concentric Paths” – which Marwood premiered in September 2005 in Berlin and at the BBC Proms – is the result of a fruitful musical partnership with the composer. He has since performed the work on numerous occasions, giving the U.S. premiere with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the French premiere in Paris with the CBSO, and the Russian premiere in St. Petersburg. His recording of the work on EMI, with the composer conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, has received outstanding reviews and was Gramophone’s Recording of the Month. Adès and Marwood are touring a program of all Stravinsky’s music for violin and piano, with a recording released on the Hyperion label in February 2010. They performed at Carnegie Hall in New York with cellist Steven Isserlis in March.

Marwood has made well over 30 recordings, and is a Hyperion artist. These recordings include sonata repertoire by Dvorak (Classic CD Award) and Schumann (Gramophone Award nomination) with the pianist Susan Tomes, and concertos by Stanford (Gramophone Award nomination), Coleridge-Taylor and Somervell, and Kurt Weill and Peteris Vasks. Future plans include concerto CDs by Britten and Schumann.

Marwood is the violinist of the celebrated Florestan Trio (the first trio to win a Royal Philharmonic Society Award, in 2000) and has performed all over the world with his colleagues Richard Lester and Susan Tomes. They have recorded much of the mainstream trio repertoire on Hyperion, many of them becoming benchmark performances. He has embarked on a touring project with the pianist Aleksander Madzar, which will culminate in a series of three concerts at Wigmore Hall in the 2010/11 season.

Anthony Marwood enjoys teaching and attends the Yellow Barn Festival in Vermont each summer, where students and faculty perform together in a rural setting.

He plays on a beautiful violin by Carlo Bergonzi (1736), kindly bought by a syndicate of purchasers.